Speech-Acts, Conventions, and Voice: Challenges to a ... - JAC Online

570 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
tance to this oppression. Literacyinstruction, especially writing, was common
and connected to central values of freedom and education. African
Americans have both a long and a powerful history of writing for social
action. When "literacy" is separated both from "literature" and from
"composition," these progressive examples of uses of literacy outside the
academy are lost to us and our students. Bell hooks' insistence OR the
connection between activism and literacy reconnects the academy with the
political world it inhabits and reconnects us with the political work that we
have a responsibility to take up.
CaliforniaState University
Chico,California
Works Cited
Cornelius, Janet Duitsman. WhenI CanReadMy TitleClear. Columbia: U of South Carolina
P,1991.
Gere, Anne Ruggles. WritingGroups. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.
Graff, Gerald. ProfessingLiterature:An InstitutionalHistory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
hooks, bell, and Cornel West. BreakingBread:InsurgentBlackIntellectualLife. Boston: South,
1991.
Marable, Manning. Race,Reform,and Rebellion. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1991.
Speech-Acts, Conventions, and Voice:
Challenges to a Davidsonian Conception
of Writing
THOMAS
G. O'DONNELL
I found the interview with Donald Davidson in the winter lAC to be both
enlightening and provocative. In the fall edition, Reed Way Dasenbrock's
response to the interview did much to place Davidson's ideas in a context in
which rhetoric and compositionists can see more clearly the issues that are
at stake aswe continue to ground our teaching practices inworkable theories.

Reader Response 571
There are two issues Iwant to address in this response: the first has to do with
Dasenbrock's dismissal of speech-act theory as relevant to the teaching of
composition; the second is an observation about conventions which I hope
will lead to a more refined and instructive Davidsonian approach to the
teaching of writing.
Although speech-act theory has proven to be useful in various fields,
Dasenbrock calls attention to its limitations in the composition classroom:
"Classic speech act theory postulates 'uptake' or a full understanding of the
'conversational implicature' as essential to communication. That seems
much less easy to posit as a norm for writing than for conversation" (524). If
we hope to import elements of speech-act theory into the composition
classroom, Dasenbrock's observation must be acknowledged. The value of
speech-act theory, however, can be much broader than Dasenbrock is allowing,
and its pedagogical significance does not depend on a congruence
between speech-acts and writing-acts; indeed, my claims rest on the assumption
that compositionists can do more toward enriching students' understandings
ofwhat language does and how it does it by focusing on issues that
are not textual but still have bearing on considerations that will ultimately
become textual: how we conceive of language broadly-theoretically-will
inevitably impact specific uses of language.
I think many of us involved in the teaching of writing work from the
hidden assumption that students come to' us devoid of any theoretical
positions regarding language and communication whatsoever. We sometimes
view them as tabula rasas in this area, despite the fact that they have
spent many years using language for various purposes. In myexperience, the
predominant theory that guides students in their workings with language is
some variation of representationalism: words (re)present preexisting ideas
that are simply named or labeled by words as needed. When speaking of
"theory" in this context, I do not mean to suggest that students come to us
with a full-blown and coherent theory of language or meaning. On the
contrary, the fact that they don't is what poses a problem; students (and
people generally) construct theories expediently,astheyare needed (Davidson
calls these "passing theories"), but the specific "needs" that crop up can also
lend spurious credence to various forms of representationalism.
The danger of representationalism lies in its tendency to diminish the
importance (and obligation) of being self-conscious about language use, and
this includes both speaking and writing. If ideas are simply "out there," and
language serves only to transfer these already-in-place concepts, the value of
studying language, practicing writing, and engaging in classroom discussions
about meaning is dubious since these activities deal only with the packaging
of concepts, not with concepts themselves. Discussions focusing on language
and words (meaning, diction, style, voice) can be too easily dismissed as
"semantics" (in a pejorative sense)-one step removed from life and all that
really matters.

572 JournalofAdvanced Composition
I have come to believe that some form of representationalism underwrites
what I can only describe as a kind of magical thinking in which
intention isimbued with an unquestioned status and power while the hazards
of actual language use are suppressed. Such positions tend to manifest
themselves in classroom discussions which involve interpretation, most
often, in workshop settings. Several semesters ago, my students and I were
participating in a workshop, and one of the papers we were going over
included the term "bitchy." 1was provoked by this word and curious as to its
sexist implications; as far as I knew (and know), the word is reserved
exclusivelyfor women, and I could not think of an adequate synonym used to
describe male character. We spent some time trying to ground the term and
its possible meanings, and after four or fivestudents had offered interpretations,
one of my students, in a state of mild exasperation, concluded: "bitchy
can mean whatever you want it to mean."
My student's claim hardly constitutes a theory of meaning, but it has
relevance as a passing theory; that is, the theory was invoked to cope with a
particular speech occasion, one in which an acceptable stabilization of
meaning was clearly impossible given the diverse interpretations offered. A
more general rendering of this theory might be something like, "words can
mean whatever you want them to mean." The making of meaning conceived
of in terms of reading an audience and consulting conventional meanings is
replaced by a trust in wants, wishes, and intentions. Mystudent took refuge
in the reassuring position that intention will somehow burn through the
obfuscations, ambiguities, and interpretive difficulties that alwayssurround
language use. This position is grounded in representationalism to the extent
that it assumes an inordinate cleavage between word and concept. Words
only "stand for" ideas: if you want to communicate something in using the
word bitchy, and you are also aware of the interpretive difficulties posed by
the word, an appealing recourse is to take refuge in what you want to mean.
Speech-act theory provides a useful way to approach representationalism
and its variants-any theory that regards language as acollection ofwords
that name independently existing concepts. In How To Do Things With
Words,J.L.Austin works through hisnowclassicdistinction between constative
and performative utterances: simply put, constative utterances describe a
state of affairs; performative utterances actually do something; they perform
an action. "1saw him mowing his lawn yesterday," is a constative utterance;
"I promise to take you to the hockey game," is a performative: the utterance
is coincidental with the establishing of a contract.
Austin introduced the distinction between constatives and performatives
to clarify philosophical muddles endemic to assessments of meaning that
dwelled on whether a statement is true of false. Constative utterances are
subject to such evaluations; performatives are not. The most fundamental
accomplishment of Austin's distinction is that it forces a broadening of our
understanding of what language does, what we do when we use words in

Reader Response 573
various situations. In the writing classroom, introducing performative
utterances leads students to consider aspects of language that are clearly
incompatible with anystrain 0 frepresentationalism. When someone says, "I
forgive you," the utterance is not a statement of fact but an action. When you
say,"I apologize," it is difficult to conceive of analyzing the "meaning" of this
sentence by speculating on a specific concept it represents or transports.
When language overtly performs an action, questions of meaning become
more clearly questions of use.
I do not mean to suggest that introducing students to performative
utterances will somehow lead them to a sophisticated theory of meaning, but
in more optimistic moments, I hope that my students, in having to account
for the performative utterances instrumental in their own daily activities, are
inspired to see language and meaning more in terms of self-conscious
employment and less in terms of wanting or wishing a word to mean a
preexisting idea. I hope, that is, that the claim "bitchycan mean whatever you
want it to mean," will be recast into a more valuable passing theory: "bitchy
can mean various things to various people, so assess your audience and the
likelihood that your meaning (intention) will be clear to them." This may be
a formidable task, but posing the problem in this way involves students in an
inquiry into the meaning making process that does not rely on the assumption
that meaning is entirely a function of wanting to mean something or
meaning to mean something.
Voice, Conventions, and Meaning
My second point is intended to encourage and further discussions about
conventions-what they are (or might be), and their usefulness in the
teaching of writing. It is unfortunate, I believe, that Austin's legacy is most
visible in references to How To Do Things With Words and the constative/
performative distinction. Discussions of Austin's work become less productive
the more they assume that Austin was proposing or assuming a theory of
language; as Stanley Cavell remarks, the work "does not for Austin yield a
theory of language; on the contrary, he takes this work to show how far we are
from anything he would regard as a serious theory of language" (Themes 35).
Although the constative/performative distinction is valuable (with notable
limitations), Austin's more striking insights occur when he is engaged
in painstakingly working out subtle distinctions of ordinary language, as he
does, for example, in "A Plea For Excuses." Following the essay along as
Austin refines distinctions between and among "excuses," "justifications,"
"mistakes," "accidents," "inadvertence," "unintentional," and so on, I feel
tha t I'm rediscovering or relearning the waysin which we explain, excuse, and
justify human action. Cavell characterizes Austin's procedures and their
effects in this way:
The positive purpose in Austin's distinctions resembles the art critic's purpose in
comparing and distinguishing works of art, namely, that in the crosslight the capacities

574 Journal of Advanced Composition
and salience of an individual object in question are brought to attention and focus....
In Austin's hands, I am suggesting, other words, compared and distinguished, tell what
a given word is about. To know why they do, to trace how these procedures function,
would be to see something of what it is he wishes words to teach, and hints at an
explanation for our feeling ... that what we learn will not be new empirical facts about
the world, and yet illuminating facts about the world. (Must We 103-04)
The power of Austin's work lies in what Cavell calls the discovery of
"illuminating facts about the world," but I am particularly interested in how
such work, such procedures and their results, may challenge what we mean
when we speak of conventions, especially when we speak of them in terms of
their significance and application in the teaching of writing. At one point in
his response to Davidson's interview, Dasenbrock posits a particular relationship
between voice and conventions: "We attain our own voice, a
Davidsonian approach to usage suggests, not by slavishly following nor by
desperately avoiding received conventions, but by playing off against them.
The more radical our departure from received conventions, the more we risk
unintelligibility; but the more we respect and follow received usage, the more
we risk boredom" (525). As Dasenbrock casts the problem, the chief task
involved in cultivating a personalized voice is navigating between unintelligibility
and boredom, but Austin's work suggests to me alternatives to this
characterization. His most challenging and illuminating work involves the
exposureof conventions, but I would hardly describe the results of his
enterprise as boring. I am not suggesting that Austin's philosophical voice
fails to challenge conventions; indeed, one of his trademarks as a philosopher
is his routine employment of striking and original examples, a skill that
distinguishes his philosophizing. Those of us who find Austin's work
uniquely clarifying, however, would not likely attribute this power to the
thwarting of the conventions of philosophical discourse but to specific
Austinian demonstrations which remind us of the forgotten power of conventions
to demarcate conceptual boundaries with astounding precision. It
is usually when hidden capacities of conventional usage are brought to light
that questions surrounding conventions become both more urgent and more
difficult. What are conventions? How can we characterize our investment
in them? Conventions are often characterized as arbitrary, mere collective
choices, but Cavell takes issue with Stanley Fish on this matter and exposes
the limitations of explaining conventions in terms of agreements:
But Fish's words here make this agreement seem much more, let me say, sheerly
conventional than would seem plausible ifone were considering other regions ofAustin's
work, for example, the region of excuses,where the differences, for one small instance,
between doing something mistakenly, accidentally, heedlessly, carelessly, inadvertently,
automatically, thoughtlessly, inconsiderately, and so on are worked out with unanticipated
clarity and completeness but where the more convinced you are by the results, the
less you will feel like attributing them to agreements that are expressible as decisions.
How could we have agreed to consequences of our words that we are forever in the
process of unearthing, consequences that with each tum seem further to unearth the
world? (I don't say there is no way). (Themes 40)

Reader Response 575
The problem may be that Austin is revealing something, but we don't quite
know how to characterize these revelations; in displaying conventions in the
ways he does, are we to view them as agreements, shared meanings, or some
kind of elusive solidarity, something akin to what Wittgenstein calls "forms
of life?" Whatever the answer may be, it is clear that work such as Austin's
urges us to clarify what we can meaningfully convey by "conventions," since
they must be something more (or something more difficult to explain) than
mere agreements.
Part of my difficulty with Dasenbrock's notion of "voice" as something
to be struck by negotiating between unintelligibility and boredom may have
to do with the incongruity which characterizes the options: is one's voice
likely to be less boring the more it approaches unintelligibility? Is intelligibility
the aspect of writing (or language use in general) that is most at risk in
efforts to circumvent boredom? To what extent does risking boredom and
following received usage assure intelligibility?
The question of intelligibility generates questions of meaning, and
conventions are certainly an issue here, especially if we characterize them as
established ways of making meaning; it seems more difficult, or a different
kind of task altogether, to specify what is at stake, what is missing, what is
present, when a voice "bores." Although I find myself willing to evaluate
voice in terms of its reliance on or deviation from accepted conventions, I
think it unlikely that avoicewhich does nothing to challenge conventions will
necessarily be boring. Whether or not a voice is "boring" or "engaging" (I do
not think there is an exact antithesis) strikes me as a different question
altogether ,one that willinvoIveme in the act 0 fcriticism, the results of which
mayor may not include an indictment (or praise) of conventions.
Seeing the cultivation of voice in terms of pushing the envelope of
conventional usage seems to me to be a misrepresentation of the issue and
one that fails to account for the surprises of learning that often accompany
encounters with the conventional, and these surprises are not limited to
those with philosophical training. Indeed, my suggestions here grow out of
a larger conviction that conventions themselves can serve as the very source
of a philosophically-oriented rhetoric. A semester ago, a student of mine
wrote an essay in which he analyzed the various ways and contexts in which
he employs the verb to know. Among his discoveries was the realization that
the grammar of knowing (grammar in the Wittgensteinian sense of the word)
is multifaceted. The most striking example my student used was a scene in
which his mother told him, "you've got to clean up your room." His response
was, "I know," but he went on to explain in his essay that in claiming to
"know," he did not communicate to his mother an acknowledgment of the
fact that his room was untidy, nor did he intend to; "I know," in the context
in which he used it, meant something more akin to "leave me alone," or "I'll
take care of it later." This is a case in which a conventional expression-a
claim of knowledge-is used for a specific, context-bound rhetorical effect. I

576 Journal ofAdvanced Composition
see my student's efforts at working through these different uses of "I
know"-his inclination to talk about the use of a word in terms of intention,
grammar, and consequence-as the beginnings of a way of thinking about
language that is philosophical, and I believe such discoveries are just as
valuable to students as learning about the ways in which conventions constrain
voice.
In mapping out the applications of Davidson's ideas for teachers of
writing, Dasenbrock writes, "In emphasizing the mutability of our prior
understanding, Davidson establishes creativity and innovation at the very
heart of communication" (525). I close with two questions: first, "prior
understanding" of what, exactly? Second, do "creativity and innovation"
necessarily mandate a challenge to conventions? My reading of Austin's
work and Cavell's characterization of its results, and myconviction that the
study of conventions (their limits and peculiar powers) is valuable and
inherently philosophical, suggest that creativity and innovation can just as
often be a case of calling to mind (being reminded of) the depth to which and
the particular ways in which conventions determine what we say and mean
and what we can say and mean.
FloridaState University
Tallahassee,Florida
Works Cited
Cavell, Stanley. Must WeMean Mat WeSay. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. 97-114.
-. ThemesOut of School:Effectsand Causes. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. 27-59.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way. "A Response to 'Language Philosophy, Writing and Reading: A
Conversation with Donald Davidson." JournalofAdvanced Composition 13 (1993): 523­
28.
A Reply to Thomas G. O'Donnell
REED WAY DASENBROCK
The situation of responding to a response to one's own response to an
interview is sufficiently dialogic that it seems we ought to be discussing
Bakhtin or Gadamer rather than Davidson, Austin and Cavell,not that these
are utterly incompatible thinkers. But I appreciate the care and openness to
dialogue apparent in Thomas O'Donnell's response, and I welcome the
opportunity to clarify and extend my thoughts on the two central points he
makes.